Chapter Nine: The Beach Boys And Newsroom Changes

David Barrett, managing editor, speaks with Elaine Kramer in The Courant's newsroom.

David Barrett, managing editor, speaks with Elaine Kramer in The Courant's newsroom.

JOSEPH F. NUNESSpecial to The Courant

Life in a newsroom is different every day, its rhythms set by external forces. But 1979 was something new.

While the staff waited to see what effect — if any — corporate ownership might bring to The Courant, a more palpable shift was signaled when the clickety-clack of typewriters was replaced by the subdued tip-tap of desktop computers with soft-blue hues.

Meanwhile, Hartford's myriad issues were being covered with depth, including new political dynamics that would lead to the election of the city's first African American mayor a year later. "At that time, the coverage of Hartford truly grew up," Hartford editor Jim Smith said. "We covered every corner of the city."

Inside The Courant, there was a sense that a milestone had been reachedand, for some, the journey was over.

After the sale to Times Mirror was complete, Courant President Ed Downes went home sick for nearly a month and soon announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year, staying long enough to provide a smooth transition for his successor. Times Mirror named Keith L. McGlade, 42, as The Courant's publisher and chief operating officer.

It was 1980 and corporate ownership at The Courant had begun.

"My task was to make more money, and we did," said McGlade, who raised the price of the Sunday paper and advertising rates. "We used to brag that we had the lowest advertising rate per thousand, and I'd say, 'That's nothing to be proud of.'"

The price hikes paid off. The Courant's pre-tax income in 1980 jumped 39 percent; its after-tax profit margin topped 8 percent. And employees cashed in, too. For the first time in Courant history, the annual year-end bonus hit six weeks' pay, which would become a regular occurrence for some years.

Northeast Magazine debuted in The Courant on March 21, 1982. "Spiked" took an unflattering look at The Courant.

Northeast Magazine debuted in The Courant on March 21, 1982. "Spiked" took an unflattering look at The Courant.

Shortly after McGlade's arrival, executive editor Richard E. Mooney invited him for cocktails at his West End home and asked McGlade what he had in mind for the paper.

"I think you need a cartoonist," he said, and Mooney agreed. In December 1980, The Courant hired its first full-time political cartoonist, Bob Englehart, who is at the newspaper still. But much bigger changes were in the offing.

Times Mirror at the time had a reputation for giving its individual newspapers a lot of autonomy, something that had been emphasized in the sale. But McGlade said he soon found himself getting unsolicited advice from his Times Mirror bosses, including the suggestion that he change editors. And that's how Mark Murphy came to leave The Los Angeles Times for Hartford.

'Beach Boys' Surf Into Town

Well before he stepped into The Courant's newsroom on March 1, 1981, Murphy was preceded by an almost mythic reputation. Brusque yet affable, Murphy was said to have inspired the curmudgeon editor Lou Grant in the sitcom, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

Murphy, 47, had a swagger and strong opinions about what made a fine newspaper — attributes he found lacking at The Courant. Weeks before he came to town, he gave an interview to the Washington Journalism Review, in which he called The Courant ridiculously parochial and "worse than mediocre, an embarrassment to the profession."

Murphy began by assembling a quartet of young deputies from The Los Angeles Times to help transform The Courant from a newspaper focused on the towns and cities of Connecticut to a paper with aspirations to cover national news. They were nicknamed "the Beach Boys."

A massive shift in assignments soon began, mostly from the old state desk. A new national editor oversaw all news from outside the state, including the Washington bureau, which was tripled in size. The business news desk grew from three to nine people. Sports coverage was expanded to include full-time beat writers covering professional sports, including the Red Sox and Yankees. A redesign gave the newspaper an airier, more accessible look. There was a new emphasis on livelier writing, more-compelling stories and less local minutiae.

The team from L.A. also overhauled and expanded the photography department, ending the ages-old practice of having staff photographers shoot real estate and advertising pictures for the newspaper.

"It was the beginning of changing the culture from newspapering to photojournalism," said veteran staff photographer John Long.

Murphy bought The Courant more personality and tone through new columnists and a new Sunday magazine editor. The debut issue of Northeast on March 21, 1982, was a success. It totaled 112 pages, 72 devoted to advertising. Within a year, Northeast capped its storybook launch by tying for first place with The New York Times Sunday Magazine as the best newspaper magazine in the country.

Taken together, the organizational changes, redesign, new hires and stylish magazine made The Courant more vibrant, cosmopolitan and thought-provoking.

But there was a problem — as anyone who had studied the history of The Courant would have anticipated. The readers were unhappy with cutbacks in news from their local towns.

To pay for the improvements, there had been deep cutbacks in town news, undoing what many viewed as the key to The Courant's success. The first retrenchment in the town coverage came six weeks after Murphy arrived, when he closed what he called "one of those Mickey Mouse bureaus" in Winsted.

By mid-1982, nine of the 14 suburban bureaus were closed, consolidated into five regional bureaus in Middletown, New Britain, Enfield, Manchester and Avon. The town news reporting group was down to 25 reporters or one-third of its previous size.

The cutback in town news led to protests outside the newspaper offices on Broad Street, where demonstrators — including community leaders — hanged the new editor in effigy and carried signs lamenting "The Late Hartford Courant." And the dissatisfaction affected sales, as readers canceled subscriptions. Average daily circulation dropped from about 215,000 at the time of the Times Mirror purchase to 211,000 in 1981 and 209,000 in 1982.

By mid-1983, Times Mirror corporate officials had had enough. Not only were they concerned about the local news backlash and decline in circulation, they also were getting an earful from the city's corporate executives complaining about Murphy's community relations.

"[Murphy] didn't understand the concept of a locally oriented paper," managing editor Irving Kravsow said. "He just couldn't relate to the Land of Steady Habits or the fact that readers had been reading The Courant for generations and that they considered it 'our paper.' That concept was foreign to him."

Murphy returned to Los Angeles, and in September 1983, The Courant got a new editor, Michael J. Davies. He, too, was preceded by a reputation — this one for working newspaper miracles.

A white-shirt, cuff-linked conservative, Davies, 39, was what some staffers called "the anti-Murphy." Where Murphy was bombastic, crude and unpredictable, Davies was soft-spoken, suave, calculated. Where Murphy abhorred glad-handing community leaders, Davies immediately met with political, business and neighborhood figures, earning their goodwill. And where Murphy showed mostly disdain for the "old Courant," Davies made it clear that he understood the newspaper's vaunted history, its readers and what they expected.

In his first week, Davies began writing a Sunday "Letter From the Editor" that became a regular column meant to establish an open relationship with readers. He described how people from Gov. William A. O'Neill to town officials and average readers had complained to him that they had felt jilted by The Courant's cutback in town news: "It was as though an old friend had suddenly decided he was too good, too sophisticated to bother with his lifelong buddies."

Davies pledged that The Courant would change course within four months and return to more thorough town news while retaining the improvements made under Murphy. In his columns, Davies had a theme — that he and his management team were stewards of what was, essentially, a public trust and historic treasure. He soon began providing regular report cards to readers "to account for our stewardship of the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper."

While Davies worked to repair relationships in the community, there was trouble in the newsroom as new blood clashed with old. More than 100 of the 250 newsroom employees left The Courant in 1983 and 1984. Among them was veteran reporter Andrew Kreig, who quit in mid-1984 after Davies killed a six-month investigative project that had started under the previous editor. The series by The Courant's investigations desk focused on workplace-related occupational diseases for which victims were often denied workers' compensation claims. Davies "spiked" the series, saying that it was overwritten, poorly organized and boring. Team members made a plea to rewrite their findings into a single one-day package, which Davies approved. It was held for weeks before it finally was published in May on a Monday, historically the day with the lowest circulation. Kreig chronicled his experiences in the controversial 1987 book, "Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper."

In terms of town news, Davies kept his pledge and began expanding town news coverage in March 1984 by returning to "zoning," or packaging local items in geographically distinct editions. In October, he launched local news tabloids called Town Courants that also varied in the six news zones and, once again, town news reporters were hired to staff bureaus in Enfield, Manchester and Middletown.

By 1989, another town news expansion — for which the paper hired another 45 reporters and 25 correspondents — extended The Courant's coverage to 82 of the state's 169 municipalities, including regular sports coverage of 119 high schools. The scope of town news coverage was nearly back to its 1970s peak.

Other initiatives included a Saturday Motoring section, a Sunday Commentary section and a series of new specialty feature sections. Davies also brought to The Courant a formula for success that had worked so well in Kansas City — forming investigative teams to monitor government performance, in keeping with the watchdog role that he considered a newspaper's vital responsibility.

In advance of the first anniversary of the sensational collapse of the Mianus River Bridge on I-95 in Greenwich, the metro editor and projects editor David S. Barrett (later editor of The Courant) assembled a team of reporters to surreptitiously monitor state bridge inspectors. They uncovered irregularities, waste and falsification of records, including fraudulent claims of underwater inspections when no dives were performed.

The stories, starting June 24, 1984, brought government actionagainst the state workers, and a slew of national journalism awards for public service. Many other Courant investigations soon followed.

Quality journalism had become pro forma in Hartford. In 1984, the New England Newspaper Association named The Courant "Newspaper of the Year" for both its Sunday and daily editions, the first double-winner in the group's history. Many such awards followed — for spot news coverage of statewide flooding in 1984 and Hurricane Gloria's devastation in 1985, for a 1986 investigation of vote fraud in Waterbury, for consistent excellence in photography and page design.

As with many newspapers throughout the country, The Courant's most noticeable change was going from black-and-white to regularly using color in 1985-86 thanks to advancements in technology.

Readers responded to the changes. After the circulation dips under Murphy, Courant sales increased in virtually every year of Davies' tenure, from 209,000 daily in 1982 to 225,000 in 1989, from 285,000 to 312,000 on Sundays.

Circulation was climbing, the readers had been heard and the company was making money. What else could anyone want, but more?

That would be ushered in by Mike Waller, the 44-year-old editor of The Kansas City Star and Times whom Davies brought to The Courant as its executive editor in late March 1986.

While The Courant continued to strive on multiple journalistic fronts at once — in 1986, the design staff won seven of 12 first-place awards from the Society for News Design, and in March 1987, the National Press Photographers Association named The Courant's Brad Clift national photographer of the year — it was rejoining the community conversation.

Perhaps the newspaper's most significant community project was "Art for All," a public arts program inspired by Northeast magazine's Connecticut Celebrity Register, marking the 350th anniversary of the founding of Hartford and, by extension, the Connecticut colony. After editing short biographies of 350 renowned state residents, many of whom were older, the magazine editors suggested that area corporations commission public works of art before it was too late. It resulted in 10 lasting public artworks by such artists as Katharine Hepburn, Dave Brubeck, painter Cleve Gray and sculptors Charles O. Perry and Elbert Weinberg.

"Within just a few months, the paper was changing in dozens of ways. The culture was electric," Waller recounted. "The excitement was contagious."

A year later, the Davies era at The Courant came to a close when Times Mirror named him publisher of its larger paper in Baltimore, The Sun. Ray Jansen, 51, moved into The Courant's new fourth-floor executive suite as publisher and CEO, and Waller, 49, became vice president and editor.

It proved to be an effective combination as Jansen steered The Courant through a difficult recession in the early 1990s while supporting Waller to run the newsroom as he saw fit. "Our operating profits declined dramatically in the early '90s, and to [Jansen's] credit and Times Mirror's credit, they didn't take it out on the paper," Waller said.

On the contrary, The Courant continued to invest in its local news operation. Despite such occasional lean years, the news staff under Times Mirror grew from 200 in 1980 to 300 in 1989 before peaking at just under 400 in 1994.

In April 1992, The Courant won journalism's highest honor when it received its first Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for an illuminating series by veteran staff member Robert S. Capers and young reporter Eric Lipton that ran for four days in March and April 1991. The stories described how a flawed mirror built at Connecticut's Perkins-Elmer Corp. crippled the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope and, by extension, pointed up serious problems with America's space program.

The Courant was finding innovative ways to fulfill its newly drafted mission statement, which included "being a responsible force for progress in our community." In 1992, it collaborated with local poet Rennie McQuilkin and the Hill-Stead Museum to present the first Sunken Garden Poetry Festival that drew nearly 2,000 people. It became the top poetry festival in the country for a dozen years, drawing scores of acclaimed poets to the often-magical readings in the bucolic setting.

More series followed and more awards, as The Courant rode a wave of success. Few in the newsroom knew that profits were down, an effect of the recession, and that a far larger threat to print traditions was looming — for the World Wide Web had opened for business.